


Will Protect You From All Around You

by zombiesbecrazy



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Bruce Wayne is a Good Dad, Dick Grayson is Robin, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, he's trying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2019-05-24 12:20:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14954591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zombiesbecrazy/pseuds/zombiesbecrazy
Summary: Bruce has always expected that one day he'll wake up and feel like a Real Adult, but it hasn't happened yet. Why had he thought that this parenting thing would be easy?





	Will Protect You From All Around You

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Father's Day Bruce Wayne!

“Something on your mind, chum?”

Dick normally threw himself into their after school training sessions at top speed. He was eager to run and jump and fly after hours of being cooped up in class all day and from the moment they entered the Cave he was excited and ready to do anything Bruce threw at him.

Today was different. He was going through the motions, but his mind and heart were clearly elsewhere as they went through their usual warm up. In an attempt to cheer him up, Bruce had forgone the scheduled weapons training and switched to gymnastics instead because Dick always smiled brighter on those days, but today it hadn’t changed the gloomy mood in the room. Dick was distracted as he went through a routine on the beam and after the third stumble on the same basic landing that Bruce knew he could land injured and blindfolded, Bruce stopped him and patted the beam. Dick plopped down and Bruce pulled himself up to sit side by side with him.

Dick looked down at his feet, watching them swing under the bar for a minute and Bruce waited for him to share his thoughts. “It’s just…” Dick paused and stilled his legs, “Are we… are Batman and Robin…” He raised his head and locked eyes with Bruce and the words tumbled out of his mouth. “Are we bad guys?”

That was not a question that Bruce had been anticipating.

Bringing Dick home and taking on a parental role had been a steep learning curve and one that Bruce still struggled with. Sure, he was an adult, but at 24 he still didn’t consider himself to be an Adult yet. Not one with a capital letter, anyway. He was still waiting to wake up one morning and be That Person; a Real Grown Up who had everything figured out. Someone responsible enough to pay taxes, raise a child and make responsible life decisions. He had people hired to do his taxes for him, but no one could really raise this nine year old for him and Proper Adults didn’t dress up as a giant bat and punch their way across the city every night.

Why had he thought that this parenting thing would be easy? Or having a protégé?

He had never been a great conversationalist either, but he did have to admit to himself that talking with kids was easier. Or at least it made more sense to him than talking to Adults because talking with kids seemed to be a lot like detective work. Sometimes it was better to ask a child for more information before answering to get a better idea of the bigger picture. Kids answered while Adults avoided. Talking this out with Dick was something that he could do. He could work this problem. Maybe. Hopefully.

“Why do you ask that?”

Dick bit his lower lip and thought about the question, his fingers moving in slow patterns beside him on the beam. “Sometimes we play Batman and Robin at recess.”

“Oh?”

Nodding enthusiastically, Dick grinned up a Bruce, his sadness momentarily forgotten. “Yeah. The other kids take turns with who gets to be Batman and Robin and whoever the main villain is. I am usually a civilian. Sometimes a cop or a thug.”

If he hadn’t been smiling in that moment, Bruce would have thought that that was the problem. That the other kids wouldn’t let him be one of the main characters in their game, but that clearly wasn’t it from the look on Dick’s face. No, the game was a fun thing that Dick enjoyed. “You don’t want to be Batman or Robin at school?” He still had to ask. Real Adults probably checked to make sure their children weren’t being bullied or left out at school.

Dick shook his head with a lopsided grin. “Nah. I get to do that all the time. Other people can have a turn when we’re playing. It makes them happy, so I don’t mind.”

Bruce smiled, because of course that was Dick’s answer. “Sounds like fun.” To be honest, it did sound like fun. Good imaginative, interactive play stimulating the mind and the body. Perfect for growing children. It could also be seen as an informal training exercise for Dick; remembering to see things from other perspectives. “What happened today? To make you ask if we’re bad guys?”

Looking away from Bruce again, Dick stared at the floor in front of them. “After Batman and Robin worked with the cops to stop Two Face and his thugs from robbing a bank, one of the kids playing a cop tried to arrest Batman and Robin.”

This wasn’t new to Bruce, especially with the way that he knew Bullock and some of the of the other GCPD officers felt about Batman, but Dick hadn’t come across such obstacles in his duties as Robin yet. The only officer that he really had interaction with so far had been Gordon and while he clearly didn’t approve of a child in the field, having given Batman some pointed comments about child welfare and endangerment laws, he seemed pacified by the limits and rules that Batman had been putting on Robin to date. “Did he say why?”

“Because Batman and Robin weren’t police officers. Because they snuck into the warehouse, which is breaking and entering.” Dick bit his lower lip in thought for a few seconds. “Because they beat up the thugs and Two Face, which is assault. They broke the law.”

“Then what happened?”

“One of the other kids who was a civilian stood up and told the cop that Batman and Robin had saved their lives and didn’t deserve to be arrested. Then the bell rang and recess was over so we stopped playing.” Dick looked across the cave in the direction of the change rooms, where their uniforms were waiting and sighed before he turned back to Bruce, eyes looking a little wetter than they had before. “Was he right? Are we bad guys?”

 _Oh, kiddo_. It was something that Bruce had struggled with himself when he had first started out, but had pushed aside for the thought of the greater good. What was he going to tell Dick? How do you walk a nine year old through an existential crisis? “What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been wondering about it since.” He kicked his feet under the beam a couple times. “He wasn’t wrong. We do all those things. We do break the law sometimes.”

“You’re right. We do.”

“Bad guys break the law.” His voice was low, like he had already made his decision. Like he thought that they were criminals and didn’t know what to do about it.

“Batman and Robin only break the law to help people, Dick.”

“My mom always said that two wrongs don’t make a right.” It wasn’t often that Dick brought up one of his parents in this particular way. It was common for him to talk about his former life in the circus and about his parents in general, but not like this. Not in a way that felt to Bruce almost like he was comparing the way his parents had raised him to what Bruce’s choices were. Bruce didn’t think that he was being necessarily judged when this happened; Dick was just questioning the different things that he was being taught from the Adults in his life, especially if they contradicted, and trying to build his own opinions. Bruce reached down and gave Dick’s hand a small squeeze.

“Mine said that too. And they were both very smart women.” What would his own mother have said if he was having a conversation with her? Or his father? It was hard to even imagine what that would have been like. He was on his own here, fumbling through parenthood without a road map. Clearing his throat, he decided to ask Dick another question. “What are Batman and Robin? If you could use one word to describe them, what would it be?”

The answer was immediate and very clear. “We’re heroes. We help people. We help Gotham.”

“We do try to help people and Gotham, but the more accurate term for what we are is ‘vigilante’. Do you know what that means?”

“Not really.”

“It means that we take it upon ourselves to enforce the law unofficially. And sometimes in order to do that we have to do what others would consider to be wrong.” Dick’s brow furrowed in thought and all Bruce could do was hope that he wasn’t messing this up. They had a variation of this talk when Dick first decided to become Robin and go after Zucco, but he was older now even if it was just by eight months. He had grown in leaps and bounds in that time and Bruce could see how smart he was for his age. “Most heroes who you know are actually vigilantes by definition.”

“Superman?”

“Yes, however most people wouldn’t call him that. The perception of Superman is different than Batman that way.”

“Flash?”

“He works with the police as his day job, but when he’s out as The Flash…”

“Green Lantern?”

“Space cop. Not a vigilante when he’s in his sector on a planet that recognizes Oa’s authority.”

“Does that mean he’s a hero sometimes and a vigilante other times? Depending on where he is?”

Bruce sighed and decided to shut down on the direction this conversation was going. It was his job to help Dick, but he didn’t have to go through a list of every member of the League or defend Hal Jordan to do so. “What makes someone a hero, Dick?”

The small boy thought about it for a couple of seconds. “When they try to help someone regardless of the cost to themselves?”

“I like your explanation.”

“But that does mean that someone could be both a hero and a vigilante, right? I mean, if Batman broke into a building to get someone out before it exploded and tied up the Riddler in the process for the cops at the same time, I think that’s both.”

“I think so too.” Looking towards the cave at the computer, Bruce thought about all the articles he had read. All the news pundits debates. Things he heard at work or at various social gatherings. “Some people think vigilantes are bad and others good. And both can be true. But we do our best to only help where we can. We are lucky that Commissioner Gordon thinks that we are helping and lets us work with the GCPD to help make Gotham better the best way that we can.” He knew that might not always be the case. Gordon could be replaced or transferred or simply change his opinion at any time and that slight safety net could go away. Not that that would stop Batman, but the cooperative nature of the relationship had its benefits.

“That’s true.”

“What have you done on patrol this week as Robin?” Since Robin had started joining him out in the field, Batman had started making two rounds of patrols three days a week. He still did his normal work late into the night, but he had added an earlier one for Robin to help with smaller tasks from six until eight. A perfect way to have him out and still back home for a snack and a story and a fairly appropriate bedtime. Alfred had told him that routine was important with kids and something that Adults definitely enforced.

“Stopped two muggings. Got a cat out of tree for a lady. Dropped off food at one of the shelters. Worked with you to stop that truck full of drugs from getting where it was going.” Most of what Robin had done so far in the field had very much geared towards ‘good samaritan’ rather than ‘vigilante’ but the line sometimes got blurry in the moment and Bruce knew that it was only a matter of time until that label changed permanently, even if it was just by association to Batman.

That week, Batman had assured that Robin had been safe at all times. The potential muggers had been disarmed before he let Robin jump in, and there had been nothing at all dangerous with the cat or the food delivery. He would have avoided the truck situation if at all possible but they had stumbled across it and he couldn’t just let it happen. Batman had stopped the truck and knocked out the two delivery men, and then let Robin zip tie them. Robin hadn’t been in any real danger, but Bruce knew that Good Parents didn’t let their kids get involved with drug shipments. Or run around in a cape and mask fighting crime at all in the first place.

“Were those bad things?”

“No. We did good work. We helped people.”

“Sometimes, people are going to say that it’s something that you shouldn’t be doing. That there shouldn’t be a Batman or a Robin. Even if they help people, they shouldn’t be breaking the law to do so.”

“Could we be arrested? Or go to jail?” Dick’s fingers were moving on the beam again, making the number eight pattern over and over again. His voice dropped. “Or could they take me to live with someone else?” Dick already wasn’t a fan of his social worker and their unannounced visits to check up on them.

Gripping the beam beneath his hands a little tighter, Bruce struggled to maintain a neutral expression. The thought of Dick being removed from his care, possibly going back to the detention center, because of his actions as Batman kept him up more nights than not, staring at the ceiling. Real Adults surely didn’t have these concerns because they had their lives in order. “That is always going to be a possibility.” It was hard to keep his voice steady to not worry Dick more than he already was, and he was pretty sure he didn’t succeed, but he owed it to him tell the truth. Bruce cleared his throat, trying to make the mysterious lump that had appeared go away. “My question for you is, are you alright with that? As Robin, you are sometimes going to have to cross lines in order to help people.” Bruce turned his head back to look at Dick and their eyes locked. “You have to decide if making that choice is worth it.”

Not blinking, Dick’s face was set in a determined way. “That’s easy. Helping people is always worth it. If we help people, maybe less people will suffer like me. Like us.” He blinked and a little of the strength left his eyes, but Bruce watched him give himself a shake and grind his teeth. “I would be okay with going to jail or… having to go away if I was able to stop someone else from hurting like that first. That’s my choice.”

“So you’ll still be Robin.”

“If you’ll still be Batman.” Dick held out his fist and Bruce bumped it with his own, making Dick smile.

“It’s a deal.” He ruffled Dick’s hair, making Dick giggle and try to move out of his reach, but failed, and his hair stood up in all directions. “So, training? Or skip it for tonight and eat cookies and watch a movie instead?”

“Can’t we do both?”

“If that’s what you want to do.”

After finishing up their beam work, Bruce and Dick headed upstairs to watch a movie before dinner, sneaking into the kitchen first for Dick to steal some cookies from under Alfred’s watchful gaze as Bruce acted as a distraction, chatting away about his morning at the office. As a Real Adult who cared about nutrition and balanced meals, Alfred clearly noticed but chose to say nothing when Bruce raised his finger to his lips. Once in the living room, Dick chose his movie and then laid down on the couch, using Bruce’s thigh as a headrest and curling up in a ball under a blanket. The beginning of Disney’s Tarzan started playing on the screen and Bruce immediately started running his fingers through Dick’s hair with a small frown on his face. He had learned in the past year that this was Dick’s default movie for when he was missing his parents and feeling blue, which meant that despite Dick’s change in mood in the cave and cookies in his belly he was obviously still a little down. Bruce silently offered Dick his remaining cookie, which was taken and eaten without a word.

“Bruce?”

The voice was so quiet, muffled by his position against him, that Bruce almost hadn’t heard it. “Hmm?”

“You’re doing a good job.”

“I’m sorry?” Bruce was confused, because he really wasn’t doing anything, and being used as a pillow didn’t count as a job.

“You are doing a good job looking after me.”

His hand stopped moving through Dick’s hair, pausing with his fingers tangled in the strands. “What do you mean?”

Small shoulders shrugged and Dick kept watching the screen where Kala had just tried to put Tarzan on her back like any other baby gorilla, and he slipped, just for her to catch him in time. “You’re like Kala. I’m not yours, but you are taking care of me anyway. Sometimes, you look nervous. Not when we are Batman and Robin, but when we are Bruce and Dick. But you don’t have to.” Another shrug. “You’re doing good. I just thought you should know.”

This. This was one of those moments that made all the doubting and fear worth it. They had watched this movie at least thirty times since Dick had come to the manor and while he obviously related to Tarzan, this was the first time that he had mentioned noticing a parallel between Bruce and Kala. Bruce lifted his hand to squeeze Dick’s shoulder, he saw that his hand was trembling.

“Thanks, chum. That means a lot.”

Dick thought he was doing a good job. Dick thought he was a Real Adult and that he was doing okay at this Parenting thing.

It was the only opinion that really mattered.


End file.
